High-grade textiles (e.g. Cashmere, Pashmina and other natural fibers) are nowadays often counterfeited. Cashmeres shawls labeled as 100% Pashmina can be made out of almost 100% polyester or other synthetic fibers. For this reason, a tool to proof the fabric composition declared on the label is very desirable. The object of this invention is a reliable method to determine the type and the nature of a fiber. The characteristic diffraction pattern of the fiber, recorded with an USB camera, enables the determination of the thickness, the surface structure as well as the grade of transparency and eventually the internal structure of the fiber. On the base of this information a reliable identification of the fiber material is provided.

As Germany's association of technology- and patenttransfer agencies TechnologieAllianz e.V. is offering businesses access to the entire range of innovative research results of almost all German universities and numerous non-university research institutions. More than 2000 technology offers of 14 branches are beeing made accessable to businesses in order to assure your advance on the market. At www.technologieallianz.de a free, fast and non-bureaucratic access to all further offers of the German research landscape is offered to our members aiming to sucessfully transfer technologies.

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

Controlling electronic current is essential to modern electronics, as data and signals are transferred by streams of electrons which are controlled at high speed. Demands on transmission speeds are also increasing as technology develops. Scientists from the Chair of Laser Physics and the Chair of Applied Physics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have succeeded in switching on a current with a desired direction in graphene using a single laser pulse within a femtosecond ¬¬ – a femtosecond corresponds to the millionth part of a billionth of a second. This is more than a thousand times faster compared to the most efficient transistors today.

At the productronica trade fair in Munich this November, the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT will be presenting Laser-Based Tape-Automated Bonding, LaserTAB for short. The experts from Aachen will be demonstrating how new battery cells and power electronics can be micro-welded more efficiently and precisely than ever before thanks to new optics and robot support.

Fraunhofer ILT from Aachen relies on a clever combination of robotics and a laser scanner with new optics as well as process monitoring, which it has developed...

Plants and algae use the enzyme Rubisco to fix carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere and converting it into biomass. Algae have figured out a way to increase the efficiency of carbon fixation. They gather most of their Rubisco into a ball-shaped microcompartment called the pyrenoid, which they flood with a high local concentration of carbon dioxide. A team of scientists at Princeton University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University and the Max Plank Institute of Biochemistry have unravelled the mysteries of how the pyrenoid is assembled. These insights can help to engineer crops that remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while producing more food.

Our brains house extremely complex neuronal circuits, whose detailed structures are still largely unknown. This is especially true for the so-called cerebral cortex of mammals, where among other things vision, thoughts or spatial orientation are being computed. Here the rules by which nerve cells are connected to each other are only partly understood. A team of scientists around Moritz Helmstaedter at the Frankfiurt Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and Helene Schmidt (Humboldt University in Berlin) have now discovered a surprisingly precise nerve cell connectivity pattern in the part of the cerebral cortex that is responsible for orienting the individual animal or human in space.